Project management involves the planning, organizing, securing and managing of resources in order to successfully complete specific project goals and objectives. In project management, resource allocation typically includes the scheduling of activities and the resources required by such activities while taking into consideration both the resource availability and the project time. The decisions to allocate resources to a particular cell or department, for example, may be made during the design stage or in some cases during an intermediate process improvement initiative. The resources allocated at that stage are optimum considering the information available at that time.
The demand patterns, however, may undergo permanent or seasonal variations in demand during the life cycle of a process, due to changes in, for example, customer and user requirements. Additionally, there can also be changes in the execution speed of particular processes as process operators become more proficient at their tasks or begin performing new types of tasks. As a consequence, the process moves into a state of sub-optimal performance. Such changes can render the initial resource allocation sub-optimal, which will result in below-par performance of the processes. The actual number of resources required may be higher or lower than the initially allocated number.
FIG. 1 illustrates a graph 100 that plots data indicative of a job demand between example departments 101, 102 and 106 in a process. As shown in FIG. 1, departments 101, 102 and 106 began with roughly a similar amount of demand. In the scenario outlined in FIG. 1, however, a violations processing department 103 experienced a permanent downturn in demand. As a result in this particular scenario, a tag processing department 101 encountered a consistent increase in demand while a general correspondence department 102 encountered a seasonal reduction in demand around week four, which then lasted for the duration of the next four weeks.
FIG. 2 illustrates a graph 150 depicting the impact of the variation in job demand with respect to employee utilization. Continuing with the scenario depicted in FIG. 1, the impact of the variation in job demand with respect to employee utilization is indicated by the data of graph 150. The utilization of employees in the tag processing department 101 increased because of the increase in the demand and at the same time the utilization of employees in violations processing 103 reduced significantly. Though the process owners can re-evaluate and reconfigure the process to reach its peak performance, because of the speed and the recurrence of changes, the reevaluation has to be done quite frequently. Additionally, process re-evaluation is a manual and data intensive activity and is very expensive to perform. Thus, most processes are not able to quickly adapt to the changes and such processes run at a sub-optimal performance level a majority of the time.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an improved dynamic resource allocation system and method for dynamically allocating resources between departments in a business or organizational process, such as, for example printshop environments or other transactional job environments, as will be described in greater detail herein.